Los Angeles Teachers Set to Strike on Monday: What You Need to Know

More than 30,000 teachers at the Los Angeles Unified School District — the second-largest school district in the country after New York City — are about to go on strike. Support for L.A. teachers has been pouring in from across the country and, crucially, from within their own community too. Here is what you need to know about the upcoming strike and the politics & organizing around it:

"There is a waiver in the current contract that allows the district to ignore any and all class size caps, as long as they claim financial necessity — and the administration has take advantage of this waiver every single year since the great recession in 2009. That year, the district issued massive teacher layoffs, which increased class sizes in nearly every school." Read more >

Schott grantee partner the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools has produced a microsite explaining the issues that community members in Los Angeles are fighting for, including more school funding, less over-testing, smaller class sizes, and an end to discriminatory "random" searches of students. Read more & donate to the solidarity fund >

"The union has made parent and community outreach a big priority. Teachers have passed out leaflets to parents at every school, held meetings with parents, and developed contact lists of supportive parents who they’ll invite to the picket lines. In the fall, the union held eight regional parent forums, each of which drew hundreds of parents eager to find out how they could help win more school funding." Read more >

"If Los Angeles teachers walk off the job January 14, as widely expected, it will be a meta-strike with extremely high stakes not only for teachers, students and parents in L.A., but for public education across the U.S. The stalemated negotiations over wages, class size, staffing and other issues matter – but they are proxies for an epic fight that has been playing out in American school districts for more than a decade." Read more >

If Los Angeles teachers go on strike this week or next, it won’t just be about dollars and cents — it will be part of a broader fight over the role of charter schools and an obscure but influential school reform idea.

“This approach, drawn from Wall Street, is called the ‘portfolio’ model, and it has been criticized for having a negative effect on student equity and parent inclusion,” teachers union president Alex Caputo-Pearl wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed Monday. Read more >